Wu Wenqing, Geng Le and Steven Bielinski (from left) at the second Annual China Pink Market Conference in Shanghai this week Photo: Ni Dandan/GT

The Singles' Day shopping festival on November 11 this year had something different. In one advertisement on Tmall, one of the major online shopping platforms, there was a witty reminder for same sex couples thinking about taking their partners home to meet the parents to buy a pair of running shoes and a washboard - a humorous reference to the way parents might react. The children could either run away or be made to kneel on a washboard, a traditional Chinese family punishment.

This is not the first time that the Alibaba Group that owns Tmall has demonstrated a positive marketing attitude toward LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people. Earlier this year, the group financed seven same-sex couples from China to be married in the US.

Alibaba is one of a growing number of Chinese companies that have started to approach the LGBT community. "Over the past year, companies including Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Dangdang and other Chinese domestic firms have started advertising and reaching out through social media to LGBT people for the first time as customers, expressing support for LGBT diversity and inclusion," said Steven Bielinski, the founder of WorkForLGBT, at the second Annual China Pink Market Conference this week.

The conference saw the release of the 2015 China LGBT Community Report, a record-breaking survey of 18,647 people in the LGBT community in China. Up to 48 percent of this community say corporate support for LGBT causes and policies could be the biggest influence on their purchasing habits.

An LGBT-friendly business logo Photo: Internet

Potential customers

As an LGBT community normally accounts for between 5 and 10 percent of a population, in China this is no small number of potential customers that businesses could target. Zhang Bo, who works with a venture capital firm, said at the conference that as the mobile era has imposed increasing challenges to the advertising business, how to accurately and effectively reach a company's target customers is the key problem.

"A growing number of businesses are showing interest in LGBT people because it's a community that has strong aggregation effects and members of the community have strong recognition of each other," she said. "While specifically approaching this group of people, companies are sending out strong messages that they are open, inclusive, bold and young."

Corporate support and an increased demand in surrogacy services were also among the topics discussed at the conference.

The growing interest in the LGBT community that Chinese businesses have shown stood at odds with an LGBT job fair held in the city earlier this year where only one of the 17 employers at the fair was Chinese and that actually was a company founded to serve the gay community.

Bielinski told the Global Times that the driving force for Chinese companies to advertise for the LGBT people was that they saw a market opportunity externally. "Even though a very small percentage of Chinese people are openly gay, a small percentage of China's huge population is still a significant number of customers that they can reach out to as new business opportunities." According to the new report, only 3 percent of the gay men and 6 percent of the lesbians surveyed were completely "out."

Bielinski said while the Chinese businesses are being motivated by the external market, inside their companies there is very little knowledge about LGBT people as employees or as internal stakeholders. However, he said in the West many companies have become very LGBT diverse and inclusive over a long period of time.

"That's primarily because LGBT employees in those companies came out as openly gay. It forced the companies in the US and Europe to consider their HR policies and company culture - they have to be inclusive and they have to respect the employees. Now that these people are 'out' in the office and could cause disagreements with other coworkers, the employers have to have better education, training and policies that limit discrimination," he said, adding that such company policies could take a long time to be properly introduced.

However, when they moved to China, many of these Western companies simply left these practices behind, said Wu Wenqing, cofounder of the L, a global lesbian dating app. "That has a lot to do with the unsupportive attitudes from the Chinese authorities," Wu told the Global Times. "But changes are happening in the past few years with unremitting efforts made by the LGBT people inside these companies."

Friends of hers have realized this sort of change in the Shanghai offices of a multinational pharmaceutical company where education and policies have been introduced to stop discrimination.

An LGBT-friendly business logo Photo: Internet

Collective efforts

"It has to be the collective efforts made by a group of people that make this happen even inside a Western company. But LGBT people are often quite united and determined for the common welfare of the group," Wu said.

Geng Le, founder and CEO of Danlan.org, a gay portal in China, and Blued, a social networking app for the gay community, said he has also observed a few Western companies doing this better. But, Geng said, some Chinese companies just believe an employee being gay or lesbian shouldn't affect performance at work.

"In reality, however, these systems inside companies matter a lot because anti-discrimination is not only just about the interests of LGBT people. Pregnant or divorced women also deserve to be better protected. It's a way for companies to demonstrate their diverse corporate culture, to better retain talent and to properly attract consumers from the LGBT community," Geng told the Global Times.

Although Chinese companies are fundamentally yet to change, they have been growing more aware of the economic influence the LGBT community could generate. And the power of money has been helping open a gate for the community, according to Geng Le.

Sixteen years ago when he founded Danlan.org, he tried to approach media organizations for publicity and he wanted to lecture at universities about discrimination. But he was always rejected. "Mainstream media were not allowed to report about us and colleges said homosexuality was a forbidden topic on campus," he recalled.

The website he founded struggled but survived over the years relying on donations from its users. It was not until 2012 when Geng founded Blued, the mobile app, that he received support from venture capital and saw his group attracting attention, and not just from people in the gay community.

Activities they've organized like offering free HIV/AIDS tests to gay people and arranging the marriages in the US for seven Chinese same-sex couples, have been widely covered in media. Universities now regularly ask him to lecture though they want him to speak about his entrepreneurial experiences rather than discrimination.

An LGBT-friendly business logo Photo: Internet

Starting from scratch 

"I talk about how I, as a gay, started from scratch to build a team of around 100, serving a user pool of more than 20 million people. But in essence, what I talk about is still anti-discrimination against the LGBT community. I want more people to see our existence. When you see our users have surpassed 20 million, which is more than four times the population of New Zealand, how can you continue to ignore or look down upon our community?" said Geng. Before this work he served as a policeman for 16 years.

"As a result, I'm really grateful to the power of market economy, which has been changing people's mindsets and could fundamentally change conventional attitudes toward us," he added.

He believes public welfare and market economy are inter-dependent. Geng said his organizations were spending large amounts to provide free saliva HIV tests for gay people and this helped ensure the general health of the public. It also gets celebrities to speak on behalf of the LGBT community to make their voices heard more clearly and takes part in gay parades around the world to boost confidence.

"With the efforts we have been making, we hope our government can rethink the services and policies they might be able to improve for the LGBT community," Geng said.

Wu Wenqing from the L agrees, saying improved financial conditions are making the voices of the lesbians better heard. The L app was founded in late 2012. Without a penny invested to promote itself, it initially registered more than 100,000 users. Last year it finally attracted an angel investment and after more than two years of operating, the platform now has more than 1.5 million registered users.

 "We're also working with celebrities. We have produced a Web series on the real life stories of lesbians. With a bigger budget, we can better show people how we exist. We're here and there's a lot of us. We do have different needs," Wu said.

Another new phenomenon for gay and lesbian couples in China is that a growing number is seriously thinking about having their own families. According to the 2015 China LGBT Community Report, around 30 percent of those surveyed said they were seriously interested in overseas surrogacy services. Forty percent of the gay and bisexual men were interested in this.

Geng Le said this type of service had been arousing interest from the first half of this year. But one company that provides this service said it had already helped 60 gay or lesbian couples find babies in the US last year.

"It's a very costly service. But the procedure doesn't break either Chinese or US laws. However at 1 million yuan ($157,178) it is a significant expenditure. Only very rich same-sex couples can afford this," he said.

Lower cost

Wu told the Global Times that the cost for lesbians was lower because they didn't need to hire a surrogate mother and could use sperm donated by friends. "But still, since the whole procedure has to be conducted in the US or sometimes in Thailand (where surrogacy is illegal), it costs at least 300,000 yuan."

The woman said two lesbian couples that she knows have already got a baby through the service. "Based on what I've seen, lesbian couples in their 30s and in stable relationships are seriously considering this option."

Steven Bielinski said that having a child was very important to same-sex couples. In the US, there was also a growing interest in this. "But unlike China, it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt a child in the US though some still prefer having a child through a surrogacy service," he told the Global Times.

It is still expensive to choose a surrogacy service but Bielinski said he believed the cost would fall if it became more acceptable and had more support. "Like anything else, the more people make the service mainstream, then the lower the cost will be," he said.